


While We Wander The Gods Smile Down Their Lament

by Pennytextrix



Category: Battlestar Galactica (2003)
Genre: Angst, Episode: s04e19-20 Daybreak, F/M, Miniseries
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-02-11
Updated: 2015-02-11
Packaged: 2018-03-11 15:27:47
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,782
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3330848
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Pennytextrix/pseuds/Pennytextrix
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Two episode related ficlets set mainly at the end of the miniseries to 'Water' but also alludes to  New Caprica Arc, Daybreak, and well bits and pieces from all seasons really. The omnipotent Aphrodite observes Laura and Bill.</p><p> </p><p>Written from the POV of Aphrodite. (Yes, I know that's weird)</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. He doesn't love you...yet

**Author's Note:**

> Look! Oh My Gods! I didn’t write porn!!!

He doesn’t love you.

Yet.

It is not yet a possibility that has crossed your mind. That will come later. And when it does it will terrify Laura. It will concern the President. Both parts of you will falter. You will think you can push him away. You will think that conscious actions can change the way you feel because the thing you don’t realise is that this connection is as much about chemistry as it is about love. This will not be a distinction you can make. But in the moment you experience its inevitable conclusion you will know that it all amounts to the same thing anyway: they are both defined by the things we seek out, those we connect with, the things we choose to cling to, our demise, our reduction, our gain, our mutation into something other if it is torn away. In your last moments in a silent raptor, gliding through the atmosphere of a planet you will never get to call home, you will come to the conclusion that atoms or electrons, human or cylon, it is all very much the same. It is life. And you will wonder only this: did he? – could your love ever understand – what you were trying to say with your last breath?

But, now, at the beginning, in this moment between your own grief and these trauma’s doubly felt and shared, it is already something you subconsciously notice: this, the chemical certainty of your attraction to this man juxtaposed against the cold reality of your situation. It would be too much to say that you hate him right now. You find him, a little irritating, perhaps, even faintly ridiculous. You are frustrated by his caution and his conventional thinking. And yet, there is something in the way he turns his body toward you when he speaks. It’s like his mind, it’s like it wants to tell you all its secrets. While you call him on the biggest of all the lies that will eventually exist between you.

“There is no Earth.” You accuse him. You expect him to protest. When he doesn’t. When he only sits there strong and contemplative you feel more that a little crestfallen.

You wanted to beat him. You wanted the moral high ground. It would have made your authority in this situation clearer. Right now you are struggling to find it at all. Already, you have clashed. He has pushed you. Questioned you. It is honest. It is helpful, and because he does all of this with a look in his eyes that says something you cannot articulate, it disturbs you.

First, his initial refusal to run after the attacks. No, you clashed much before that, in a distant, other life: You remember his angry lecture, his belittling of your position. To him you were a naive school teacher who had no idea of the damage the cylons could do if they infiltrated a networked computer system like the one you suggested. You hate that he was right. You hate that you owe your life to such outmoded attitudes. You were so sure of yourself. Then you blinked, and now such attitudes are once again timely and relevant. You do not like to be wrong. You feel awkward. You don’t want to look at him. _He knows. He knows I’m a fraud._ It repeats over and over that mantra in your head. He knows, you are sure, and that is why you are caught off guard when he makes his own position of authority vulnerable. It astonishes you that he is broken too.

He tells you his secrets. Admits his false promises and you agree to keep them. This is the first among many. In the years to come theses bonds between you will bend but never break. At times you will be surprised when they don’t. At times you will pray for their destruction. At the end you will be grateful. You feel it already. Your bonds to this man are already covalent. Impossible to break through word or deed alone.

His eyes are knowing in their chemical blue. Impossible and unnatural. He sees right through you. Sees your inadequacies. You notice the glint of derisive humour there as you ask for something in return. Too late, you realise that you just forfeited the one advantage you had over him.

In those eyes, that linger just a second too long on your legs, you see that he knows it too. Round one to Adama. (You don’t dream of calling him Bill. Not yet. That too will come soon. Sooner than you could ever have imagined.) Still. You think you might be in over your head. With him. With all of this. It’s true, you learn quickly, but still, you think you might be in trouble.

You aren’t.

Not really.

He doesn’t love you.

Yet.


	2. She doesn't love you...yet

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Based around the episode 'Water'. But alludes to New Caprica Arc, Daybreak, and well bits and pieces from all seasons really. Aphrodite talks to Bill.

She doesn’t love you.

Yet.

But already you are wondering what it might be like if she did. This is a thought that hits you quite suddenly as you watch her from the stairs leading to your quarters. She is leafing absently through your books, a tiny smile passing at the corner of her mouth, the bite of her lip in concentration they way she brushes away the strands of hair that fall across her face.

No you do not love her. It would be too much to say that you are even falling for her in this moment. This instant is far more important than that. Like a splash of freezing water to your soul, your heart, you suddenly realise that Laura Roslin is beautiful in a tired, haunted way. You are not even sure you like it. She still irritates you. Still fights you at every turn. She is still insufferable. These are not things that can be suddenly transformed by words shared, like a magic spell, cast from the book she holds in her hands.

You think she looks pale, like she might be ill. And you are doubly irritated that neither she nor her staff are looking after the President properly. This is not the time for sick and weak leaders. You do not know it yet, but one day soon, you will remember this day and curse your instinct for people. One day, very soon, you will wish you were wrong. It will hurt you that you never talked about it until it was almost too late. It will hurt you more to know that some part of you knew and did nothing about it. The first time she lays dying you grieve not just for her, but in anger at yourself. Then, you will be grateful for your second chance.

That day you vow always to protect her. You are not surprised to find that this is one promise you cannot keep. You will know, in the moment that you think it, that it is impossible. And you will never quite forgive yourself for not letting her steal an election, for leaving her to die on a stinking mud ball planet, for letting Kara take a shot at her, for letting her get kidnapped, for letting her use up her life on some idiot mission of destiny and then for watching her die again, quicker than she should have. You know, this list of your failures is not complete, but neither are they failures.

This is the one bond between you that will splinter and break over and over, only to reform stronger, at the broken places. Each time you will blame yourself. Because you need to feel that guilt. Before you were certain of her love, even after you were certain of your own, you needed its strength. It was the quest for your own redemption that pushed you forward.

The thing you could never grasp, the thing Laura will spend her final months trying to make you understand is that these were never your sins, but her choices, and stand or fall. Bend or break. She was never sorry for any of it. Still to your very end you will not believe it. You will punish yourself.

In days many before you and bleak with despair, I want you to remember this Laura, this woman standing before you now, she will be your greatest joy and your deepest sorrow. That is what you feel, with certainty, when you look at her. You feel it for a second too long, you see it stretch out before you and you push it away. Because it is too much. You do not believe in the meeting of souls, in destiny. In the gods. Right now, as you look at her you do not even believe in love. And I am sorry that you are never to find peace, but for those few moments with her. Because, I know, It did not have to be like this.

This is the first time you have really looked at her and seen her as a person and not an enemy to be circumvented, run away from or fought against. The image of herself she presents you with reminds you of happier times. Of lost weekends searching the shelves of dusty Caprican bookstores, for that new special something to adorn your collection. It hurts to realise that you can no longer remember the names of those shops. You find it astonishing, how quickly, even the important things seem to fade, even in memory. But like the woman standing in front of you, you are left with a sense of their beauty. Stunning. Alluring in some way you can’t quite place.

She is someone, you can imagine, having met there and you fantasise that had you met, you would have been brave enough to ask her out for coffee. You are amused by the thought of you arguing over who gets to take home the volume of poetry she now holds in her elegant fingers. You like to think you would have let her take it. It looks good in her hands.

As you approach her you worry that you have been staring at her so long she must have felt your eyes burning into her. You cover it by announcing your presence. You mumble something about the engine room and apologise for keeping her waiting as you move to the bathroom to wash your hands. Your fingers linger on the taps a moment, water is a commodity you can hardly afford to waste right now. Then you hear the rise and fall of her voice from the outer room as she laments her lack of books at the end of the worlds and claims a weakness for mysteries. That embarrassed, yet mischievous tone; you find it intoxicating. The cadence of it reminds you of the water that still isn’t running from the tap.

And from this moment on, you will forever associate her with water. Particularly her voice. This is before the time you know anything about her really. Long before she will tell you about how she longs for a bath, long before she tells you how she would spend her lunchtimes trailing her feet through water fountains in the river walk. Long before she feels safe enough to tell you about the morning she found out that her sisters and her father had died. But instinctively, you know her, just as you know water. It just is, until its gone. And to die of thirst is an unkind death.

One day soon you will hold her in your arms, under the canvas of her makeshift home, and you will bemoan the bad weather that has driven you away from your favourite spot on the sandbags. She will laugh snuggling into you chest as she listens to the soft patter of it and tells you that she likes it. That she’s always loved the rain. It will make you remember this moment, the moment you first thought about Laura and water. Your memories of New Caprica will be as bittersweet.

You want to reach out to her, to let her know that you understand, to offer support. To convey such subtleties, the book must be perfect. You know that there isn’t a book in existence that can say all that you want to say. Of them all _Dark Day_ comes closest. This is the first of many books you will share, each reading between the lines the things the other cannot say. It is an awkward communication. She seems to recognise that you are offering her more than a book. You notice it in the way her breath hitches as you tell her it’s a gift. In the way she says ‘thank you’ uncomfortably, as if she’s already trying to find a way to give it back.

The day she does, It feels something like loss. Something like rejection. More than a little like goodbye.

No. You never share your thoughts, your memories of her in this moment. This moment is yours alone. Although, near the end, you talked about these early days often, always agreeing there should be no regrets.

One day she will ask you to tell her about the day when you first saw Laura and not the President and you will lie and talk about alluvial deposits, her red dress, and her long bright hair drifting in the high winds of New Caprica. Because to you, this moment is too precious to share, and you will never be able to find the words to tell her about it anyway. Because you know you can’t say it and not have it sound absurd.

You will think about telling her while she sits in a hospital bed getting stoned with you and all but begging you to let go of your dreams, to say goodbye to your other love, your broken ship or risk loosing them both.

You will want to tell her she is right. That you’ve seen it. That this is not how it ends. That your home has always been with her too. But you will think she will laugh and make an ‘Admiral Atheist’ joke, and the thought of that will break your heart just a little more. You will have had enough of that feeling for one day. And you will stay silent as she talks.

It will never make any sense to you. They way you felt drawn to her this day. The way you wanted nothing more than to press her fragile strength into your chest and tell her that everything will be ok.

It makes no sense to you, not even at the end, why, from the very beginning you felt the need to protect and comfort a woman who had no need of your protection. You did not know her then. If she had died this day you would have mourned her passing only in an official capacity. It is possible that, fleetingly, you might have remembered her absent smile and how it sent shivers through you. You would have been sorry, you would have worried, but only because of the way it would have affected the fleet.

It is nothing like you will feel at the end, as you lay her down in the deep rich soil of Earth. Still and cold. You will almost believe she is only sleeping. But you will know by then, that she has never slept peacefully. Not like this. Your grief will be so strong that you’ll want nothing more than to lie down at her side. But you will make a promise to live, to build your cabin and before you cover her face with that last stone, you will kiss her lips one more time and see your own tears glistening water on her marble cheek. In this moment you will know that Laura is gone, from that too still body, and you will remember this day. The moment in which you first saw her unguarded and smiling. In this way she will know.

For you, this is all so very far away. Today there are more pressing matters to attend to. _Dark Day_ is cast aside in favour of discussing the business of the fleet. Your conversations are still tense. She irritates you. She finds you conservative. It makes you awkward. And as you sit there listening to her, letting her talk you into something dangerous, you can imagine, you can almost believe that there will come a time when you will say anything, do anything to keep her with you. To keep her safe. It bothers you to know that you might so easily become soft.

For now,

you needn’t worry.

You don’t love her,

Yet.

 


End file.
